Conference Agenda

Psychiatric diagnoses of ADHD have increased globally since the 1980s, reaching an explosive rate during the first decades of the twenty-first century (in Sjöberg 2019, 3; Simoni 2018) in Israel and elsewhere. ADHD is often presented by sociologists as the quintessential example of medicalization (Conrad & Potter 2000), the process “by which nonmedical problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illness and disorders” (Conrad 2007, 4). While seminal sociological studies (Conrad & Potter 2000; Lakoff 2000) have elucidated the social origins of the current “epidemic” of ADHD, little attention has been paid to local mechanisms of ADHD medicalization and the ways in which laypeople negotiate the meaning of ADHD. In addition, research emphasizes that it is important to deepen the understanding of how the phenomenon is shaped “by the specific institutional, social, and cultural factors” (Frazzetto et al., cited in Frigerio and Montali, 2013). Following Conrad and Potters' (2000) call to investigate the local mechanisms of medicalization, this research explores teachers' positioning in the social field of medicalization. Analyzing in-depth interviews with teachers from two Israel schools, I show how they view their role while encountering ADHD children in school and how contemporary cultural tendencies in Israel shape this role.

School is the most common institutional context for the discovery of children’s difficulties (Rafalovich 2005), and the categorization of their academic and social functioning via available systems of knowledge (Singh 2006). Studies point to the increasingly clinical role of schools in medicalizing childhood, while teachers are perceived as a “primary source of diagnostic information” (Garro & Yarris 2009, 563). It is argued that teachers identify, assess, and administer medication to “problematic” children, acting as intermediaries between clinician and parent (Malacrida 2004 Rafalovich 2005; Hjörne 2005). At the same time, teachers’ expectations of the students are influenced by diagnoses (Batzle et al. 2010).

The perceptions and positioning of teachers in the social field of ADHD is an important subject of research, primarily because of the controversial nature of ADHD as a diagnostic and clinical category. ADHD is one of the most controversial psychiatric categories. As “academic critiques spill over into popular discourse” (Malacrida 2004, 64), there is contentious debate among the lay public on the legitimacy of using medication to treat ADHD (McLeod et al. 2007), while different groups of social actors, among them teachers, frame problems linked to ADHD using different explanations and mixed discourses (Frigerio and Montali 2013). Thus ADHD children are at the center of a social controversy about the “real” causes of their behavior and the “best” way to treat them (Frigerio and Montali, 2013, 586).

I will illustrate that teachers use various, sometimes contradictory, discourses to explain ADHD diagnosis, and develop what might be called a unique pedagogical expertise. Such “lay expertise” (Eyal 2019) is based on their practical experience rather than on formal training. Teachers felt that they must find pedagogical strategies to cope with the ADHD student and see themselves as morally committed to include such student within the learning process, whether this student is officially diagnosed or not, whether they’re “with a pill [medication] or without it.” However, they enact their expertise under conditions of public mistrust: parents’ “accusation” that teachers are the main supporters of troubled students’ medication challenges teachers’ ability to be perceived as reliable pedagogical experts with the ADHD children. Despite parental mistrust, teachers are motivated to include/contain "problematic" children. I explain such motivation by local cultural and institutional conditions.

The beliefs, attitudes and practices towards attention to diversity of the different members of the university community can facilitate or hinder educational inclusion (Booth & Ainscow, 2015, Messiou et al., 2016), being the obligation of university teachers to raise awareness among future teachers of early childhood and primary education of this reality and their role in it.

In relation to the prediction and explanation of such beliefs and the behavior of others based on the attribution of mental states to themselves and others, Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the cognitive human ability to do such a thing (Astington, 1993; Wellman, 1990). This skill supports the possibility of guessing the underlying desires, intentions, thoughts and feelings (Dennett, 1978), and it's developing during childhood. Such capacities are found to be related to a variety of social and cognitive factors such as attitudes and moral reasoning.

According to Ajzen (2005) and Fishbein & Ajzen (2010), in their formulation on the theory of reasoned action, people's beliefs and attitudes are the variables that, to a greater extent, predict their behaviors. More than any other psychological construct, attitudes have been at the center of attempts to predict and explain behavior in a wide range of areas, such as organizational behavior, political behavior, and racial discrimination. In fact, as Hammond y Emler (2010) claim, variables such as attitudes to institutional authority, strength of support for moral values and maturity of socio-moral reasoning have all been identified as potential predictors of adolescent delinquency.

Consistent with Asif et al. (2020), sustainable development is promoted when the system of education provides the learners with an opportunity to equip themselves with moral values, skills, and competences that assist them in effecting personal and community positive changes. For this purpose, teachers play an important role as moral agents, and students consider the teacher a role model.

Two decades ago, Nuévalos-Ruiz (2003) tested, also in university students, the discussion of moral dilemmas as a strategy to provide moral cognitive experiences that facilitate the natural progression of moral judgment through the exposition of a peer modeling. Besides, recent studies (i.e. Daou et al., 2022), come to demonstrate that group learning based on debates are effective strategies in the acquisition of skills related to personal, social, learning to learn, citizenship, awareness and cultural expressions, essential to influence the beliefs and attitudes of our future teachers.

Our aim is related to the learning of strategies focused on developing moral reasoning. In relation to this aim, Han, Dawson et al. (2020) found that when the judgments were made based on the preferred moral schema, the reaction time for moral judgments was significantly moderated by the moral developmental status. In addition, as a participant becomes more confident with moral judgment, he or she differentiates the preferred versus other schemas better particularly when the participant’s abilities for moral judgment are more developed.